The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Extraordinary Adventures of Joseph Rouletabille
Reporter

by

Gaston Leroux

Contents

I[In which we Begin not to Understand]
II["In which Joseph Rouletabille Appears for the First Time]
III[“A Man Has Passed like a Shadow through the Blinds”]
IV[“In the Bosom of Wild Nature”]
V[In which Joseph Rouletabille Makes a Remark to Monsieur Robert Darzac which Produces its Little Effect]
VI[In the Heart of the Oak Grove]
VII[In which Rouletabille Sets out on an Expedition under the Bed]
VIII[The Examining Magistrate Questions Mademoiselle Stangerson]
IX[Reporter and Detective]
X[“We shall have to eat Red Meat—Now”]
XI[In which Frédéric Larsan Explains how the Murderer was Able to get out of The Yellow Room]
XII[Frédéric Larsan’s Cane]
XIII[“The Presbytery has Lost Nothing of its Charm, nor the Garden its Brightness”]
XIV[“I Expect the Assassin this Evening”]
XV[The Trap]
XVI[Strange Phenomenon of the Dissociation of Matter]
XVII[The Inexplicable Gallery]
XVIII[Rouletabille has Drawn a Circle between the Two Bumps on his Forehead]
XIX[Rouletabille Invites me to Breakfast at the Donjon Inn]
XX[An Act of Mademoiselle Stangerson]
XXI[On the Watch]
XXII[The Incredible Body]
XXIII[The Double Scent]
XXIV[Rouletabille Knows the Two Halves of the Murderer]
XXV[Rouletabille Goes on a Journey]
XXVI[In which Joseph Rouletabille is Awaited with Impatience]
XXVII[In which Joseph Rouletabille Appears in all his Glory]
XXVIII[In which it is Proved that one does not Always Think of Everything]
XXIX[The Mystery of Mademoiselle Stangerson]

Frontispiece

Joseph Rouletabille

Chapter I.
In Which We Begin not to Understand

It is not without a certain emotion that I begin to recount here the extraordinary adventures of Joseph Rouletabille. Down to the present time he had so firmly opposed my doing it that I had come to despair of ever publishing the most curious of police stories of the past fifteen years. I had even imagined that the public would never know the whole truth of the prodigious case known as that of “The Yellow Room,” out of which grew so many mysterious, cruel, and sensational dramas, with which my friend was so closely mixed up, if, à propos of a recent nomination of the illustrious Stangerson to the grade of grand-cross of the Legion of Honour, an evening journal—in an article, miserable for its ignorance, or audacious for its perfidy—had not resuscitated a terrible adventure of which Joseph Rouletabille had told me he wished to be for ever forgotten.